Há 62 anos um deslizamento de terras matou milhares de pessoas no Peru...

 

El Aluvión de Ranrahírca de 1962 fue un alud que el 10 de enero de 1962 afectó el área urbana de la ciudad peruana de Ranrahirca, la segunda más grande del distrito del mismo nombre, en la provincia de Yungay en la región Áncash, en el que murieron al menos 2.900 personas.

Ocho años después llega el terremoto de Áncash del 31 de mayo de 1970, que afectó a toda la región y tuvo 70.000 víctimas. Los pueblos de Ranrahírca y Yungay volvieron a ser afectados por un desprendimiento de hielo del nevado Huascarán.

  

El aluvión vino a las 18:15 a partir de fractura y desprendimiento del glaciar 511 en la cara oeste del pico norte del nevado Huascarán.​ La masa de hielo recorrió 16 km a la velocidad de 120 km/h y en 4 min la masa de piedra, hielo y rocas llegó al fondo del valle. Desaparecieron 2.900 habitantes y fueron borrados del mapa los pueblos de Ranrahirca, Shacsha, Huarascucho, Yanama Chico, Matacoto, Chuquibamba, Caya, Encayor, Armapampa y Uchucoto. En esa oportunidad el alud pasó a 1,5 km al sur de la antigua ciudad de Yungay y a 1 km al norte de la ciudad de Mancos.

     

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O zoólogo e geólogo Louis Agassiz morreu há cento e cinquenta anos...

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (Môtier, 18 de maio de 1807 - Cambridge, 14 de dezembro de 1873) foi um zoólogo e geólogo suíço, famoso pela sua Expedição Thayer.

Louis Agassiz nasceu em Môtier (Vully), no Cantão de Friburgo, Suíça. O início da sua educação começou em casa, seguido de quatro anos numa escola secundária em Bienne (alemão Biel), completou os seus estudos elementares na academia de Lausanne. Selecionando a medicina como a sua profissão, estudou nas universidades de Zurique, Heidelberg e Munique. Em seguida aumentou o seu conhecimento nos processos biológicos, especialmente na Botânica. Em 1829, doutorou-se em Erlangen e em 1830 doutorou-se em Medicina em Munique.

Mudou-se para Paris e ficou sobre a tutela de Alexander von Humboldt e de Georges Cuvier, que o lançaram nas suas carreiras da Geologia e do Zoologia respetivamente. Até esta altura não prestou nenhuma atenção especial ao estudo da Ictiologia, a qual se transformou na grande ocupação de sua vida, ou pelo menos na área em que atualmente é mais recordado.

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In 1832 he was appointed professor of natural history in the University of Neuchâtel. The fossil fish there soon attracted his attention. The fossil-rich stones furnished by the slates of Glarus and the limestones of Monte Bolca were known at the time, but very little had been accomplished in the way of scientific study of them. Agassiz, as early as 1829, planned the publication of the work which, more than any other, laid the foundation of his worldwide fame. Five volumes of his Recherches sur les poissons fossiles ("Research on Fossil Fish") appeared at intervals from 1833 to 1843. They were magnificently illustrated, chiefly by Joseph Dinkel. In gathering materials for this work Agassiz visited the principal museums in Europe, and meeting Cuvier in Paris, he received much encouragement and assistance from him. They had known him for seven years at the time.

Agassiz found that his palaeontological labours made necessary a new basis of ichthyological classification. The fossils rarely exhibited any traces of the soft tissues of fish. They consisted chiefly of the teeth, scales and fins, even the bones being perfectly preserved in comparatively few instances. He therefore adopted a classification which divided fish into four groups: Ganoids, Placoids, Cycloids and Ctenoids, based on the nature of the scales and other dermal appendages. While Agassiz did much to place the subject on a scientific basis, this classification has been superseded by later work.

As Agassiz's descriptive work proceeded, it became obvious that it would over-tax his resources unless financial assistance could be found. The British Association came to his aid, and the Earl of Ellesmere — then Lord Francis Egerton — gave him yet more efficient help. The 1,290 original drawings made for the work were purchased by the Earl, and presented by him to the Geological Society of London. In 1836 the Wollaston Medal was awarded to Agassiz by the council of that society for his work on fossil ichthyology; and in 1838 he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society. Meanwhile invertebrate animals engaged his attention. In 1837 he issued the "Prodrome" of a monograph on the recent and fossil Echinodermata, the first part of which appeared in 1838; in 1839–40 he published two quarto volumes on the fossil Echinoderms of Switzerland; and in 1840–45 he issued his Etudes critiques sur les mollusques fossiles ("Critical Studies on Fossil Mollusks").

Before his first visit to England in 1834, the labours of Hugh Miller and other geologists brought to light the remarkable fish of the Old Red Sandstone of the northeast of Scotland. The strange forms of the Pterichthys, the Coccosteus and other genera were then made known to geologists for the first time. They were of intense interest to Agassiz, and formed the subject of a special monograph by him published in 1844–45: Monographie des poissons fossiles du Vieux Gres Rouge, ou Systeme Devonien (Old Red Sandstone) des Iles Britanniques et de Russie ("Monograph on Fossil Fish of the Old Red Sandstone, or Devonian System of the British Isles and of Russia"). In the early stages of his career in Neuchatel, Agassiz also made a name for himself as a man who could run a scientific department well. Under his care, the University of Neuchâtel soon became a leading institution for scientific inquiry.

In 1837 Agassiz was the first to scientifically propose that the Earth had been subject to a past ice age. In the same year, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Prior to this proposal, Goethe, de Saussure, Venetz, Jean de Charpentier, Karl Friedrich Schimper and others had made the glaciers of the Alps the subjects of special study, and Goethe, Charpentier as well as Schimper had even arrived at the conclusion that the erratic blocks of alpine rocks scattered over the slopes and summits of the Jura Mountains had been moved there by glaciers. The question having attracted the attention of Agassiz, he not only discussed it with Charpentier and Schimper and made successive journeys to the alpine regions in company with them, but he had a hut constructed upon one of the Aar Glaciers, which for a time he made his home, in order to investigate the structure and movements of the ice.

These labours resulted, in 1840, in the publication of his work in two volumes entitled Etudes sur les glaciers ("Study on Glaciers"). In it he discussed the movements of the glaciers, their moraines, their influence in grooving and rounding the rocks over which they travelled, and in producing the striations and roches moutonnees seen in Alpine-style landscapes. He not only accepted Charpentier's and Schimper's idea that some of the alpine glaciers had extended across the wide plains and valleys drained by the Aar and the Rhône, but he went still farther. He concluded that, in the relatively recent past, Switzerland had been another Greenland; that instead of a few glaciers stretching across the areas referred to, one vast sheet of ice, originating in the higher Alps, had extended over the entire valley of northwestern Switzerland until it reached the southern slopes of the Jura, which, though they checked and deflected its further extension, did not prevent the ice from reaching in many places the summit of the range. The publication of this work gave a fresh impetus to the study of glacial phenomena in all parts of the world.

Thus familiarized with the phenomena associated with the movements of recent glaciers, Agassiz was prepared for a discovery which he made in 1840, in conjunction with William Buckland. The two visited the mountains of Scotland together, and found in different locations clear evidence of ancient glacial action. The discovery was announced to the Geological Society of London in successive communications. The mountainous districts of England, Wales, and Ireland were also considered to constitute centres for the dispersion of glacial debris; and Agassiz remarked "that great sheets of ice, resembling those now existing in Greenland, once covered all the countries in which unstratified gravel (boulder drift) is found; that this gravel was in general produced by the trituration of the sheets of ice upon the subjacent surface, etc."

In 1842–1846 he issued his Nomenclator Zoologicus, a classified list, with references, of all names employed in zoology for genera and groups — a work of great labour and research. With the aid of a grant of money from the King of Prussia, Agassiz crossed the Atlantic in the autumn of 1846 with the twin purposes of investigating the natural history and geology of North America and delivering a course of 12 lectures on “The Plan of Creation as shown in the Animal Kingdom,” by invitation from J. A. Lowell, at the Lowell Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. The financial and scientific advantages presented to him in the United States induced him to settle there, where he remained to the end of his life. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1846.

His engagement for the Lowell Institute lectures precipitated the establishment of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University in 1847 with him as its head. Harvard appointed him professor of zoology and geology, and he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology there in 1859 serving as the museum's first director until his death in 1873. During his tenure at Harvard, he was, among many other things, an early student of the effect of the last Ice Age on North America.

He continued his lectures for the Lowell Institute. In succeeding years, he gave series of lectures on “Ichthyology” (1847–48 season), “Comparative Embryology” (1848–49), “Functions of Life in Lower Animals” (1850–51), “Natural History” (1853–54), “Methods of Study in Natural History” (1861–62), “Glaciers and the Ice Period” (1864–65), “Brazil” (1866–67) and “Deep Sea Dredging” (1869–70). In 1850 he married an American college teacher, Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz, who later wrote introductory books about natural history and, after his death, a lengthy biography of her husband.

Agassiz served as a non-resident lecturer at Cornell while also being on faculty at Harvard. In 1852 he accepted a medical professorship of comparative anatomy at Charlestown, Massachusetts, but he resigned in two years. From this time his scientific studies dropped off, but he was a profound influence on the American branches of his two fields, teaching decades worth of future prominent scientists, including Alpheus Hyatt, David Starr Jordan, Joel Asaph Allen, Joseph Le Conte, Ernest Ingersoll, William James, Nathaniel Shaler, Samuel Hubbard Scudder, Alpheus Packard, and his son Alexander Agassiz, among others. He had a profound impact on the paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott. In return his name appears attached to several species, as well as here and there throughout the American landscape, notably Lake Agassiz, the Pleistocene precursor to Lake Winnipeg and the Red River.

During this time he grew in fame even in the public consciousness, becoming one of the best-known scientists in the world. By 1857 he was so well-loved that his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote "The fiftieth birthday of Agassiz" in his honor. His own writing continued with four (of a planned ten) volumes of Natural History of the United States which were published from 1857 to 1862. During this time he also published a catalog of papers in his field, Bibliographia Zoologiae et Geologiae, in four volumes between 1848 and 1854.

Stricken by ill health in the 1860s, he resolved to return to the field for relaxation and to resume his studies of Brazilian fish. In April 1865 he led a party to Brazil. Returning home in August 1866, an account of this expedition, entitled A Journey in Brazil, was published in 1868. In December 1871 he made a second eight month excursion, known as the Hassler expedition under the command of Commander Philip Carrigan Johnson (brother of Eastman Johnson), visiting South America on its southern Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. The ship explored the Magellan Strait, which drew the praise of Charles Darwin.

Elizabeth Aggasiz wrote, at the Strait: '…the Hassler pursued her course, past a seemingly endless panorama of mountains and forests rising into the pale regions of snow and ice, where lay glaciers in which every rift and crevasse, as well as the many cascades flowing down to join the waters beneath, could be counted as she steamed by them.... These were weeks of exquisite delight to Agassiz. The vessel often skirted the shore so closely that its geology could be studied from the deck.'

   

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Louis Agassiz morreu há 149 anos

   

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (Môtier, 18 de maio de 1807 - Cambridge, 14 de dezembro de 1873) foi um zoólogo e geólogo suíço, famoso pela sua Expedição Thayer.

Louis Agassiz nasceu em Môtier (Vully), no Cantão de Friburgo, Suíça. O início da sua educação começou em casa, seguido de quatro anos numa escola secundária em Bienne (alemão Biel), completou os seus estudos elementares na academia de Lausanne. Selecionando a medicina como a sua profissão, estudou nas universidades de Zurique, Heidelberg e Munique. Em seguida aumentou o seu conhecimento nos processos biológicos, especialmente na Botânica. Em 1829, doutorou-se em Erlangen e em 1830 doutorou-se em Medicina em Munique.

Mudou-se para Paris e ficou sobre a tutela de Alexander von Humboldt e de Georges Cuvier, que o lançaram nas suas carreiras da Geologia e do Zoologia respetivamente. Até esta altura não prestou nenhuma atenção especial ao estudo da Ictiologia, a qual se transformou na grande ocupação de sua vida, ou pelo menos na área em que atualmente é mais recordado.

in Wikipédia

     

   

 
In 1832 he was appointed professor of natural history in the University of Neuchâtel. The fossil fish there soon attracted his attention. The fossil-rich stones furnished by the slates of Glarus and the limestones of Monte Bolca were known at the time, but very little had been accomplished in the way of scientific study of them. Agassiz, as early as 1829, planned the publication of the work which, more than any other, laid the foundation of his worldwide fame. Five volumes of his Recherches sur les poissons fossiles ("Research on Fossil Fish") appeared at intervals from 1833 to 1843. They were magnificently illustrated, chiefly by Joseph Dinkel. In gathering materials for this work Agassiz visited the principal museums in Europe, and meeting Cuvier in Paris, he received much encouragement and assistance from him. They had known him for seven years at the time.

Agassiz found that his palaeontological labours made necessary a new basis of ichthyological classification. The fossils rarely exhibited any traces of the soft tissues of fish. They consisted chiefly of the teeth, scales and fins, even the bones being perfectly preserved in comparatively few instances. He therefore adopted a classification which divided fish into four groups: Ganoids, Placoids, Cycloids and Ctenoids, based on the nature of the scales and other dermal appendages. While Agassiz did much to place the subject on a scientific basis, this classification has been superseded by later work.

As Agassiz's descriptive work proceeded, it became obvious that it would over-tax his resources unless financial assistance could be found. The British Association came to his aid, and the Earl of Ellesmere — then Lord Francis Egerton — gave him yet more efficient help. The 1,290 original drawings made for the work were purchased by the Earl, and presented by him to the Geological Society of London. In 1836 the Wollaston Medal was awarded to Agassiz by the council of that society for his work on fossil ichthyology; and in 1838 he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society. Meanwhile invertebrate animals engaged his attention. In 1837 he issued the "Prodrome" of a monograph on the recent and fossil Echinodermata, the first part of which appeared in 1838; in 1839–40 he published two quarto volumes on the fossil Echinoderms of Switzerland; and in 1840–45 he issued his Etudes critiques sur les mollusques fossiles ("Critical Studies on Fossil Mollusks").

Before his first visit to England in 1834, the labours of Hugh Miller and other geologists brought to light the remarkable fish of the Old Red Sandstone of the northeast of Scotland. The strange forms of the Pterichthys, the Coccosteus and other genera were then made known to geologists for the first time. They were of intense interest to Agassiz, and formed the subject of a special monograph by him published in 1844–45: Monographie des poissons fossiles du Vieux Gres Rouge, ou Systeme Devonien (Old Red Sandstone) des Iles Britanniques et de Russie ("Monograph on Fossil Fish of the Old Red Sandstone, or Devonian System of the British Isles and of Russia"). In the early stages of his career in Neuchatel, Agassiz also made a name for himself as a man who could run a scientific department well. Under his care, the University of Neuchâtel soon became a leading institution for scientific inquiry.

In 1837 Agassiz was the first to scientifically propose that the Earth had been subject to a past ice age. In the same year, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Prior to this proposal, Goethe, de Saussure, Venetz, Jean de Charpentier, Karl Friedrich Schimper and others had made the glaciers of the Alps the subjects of special study, and Goethe, Charpentier as well as Schimper had even arrived at the conclusion that the erratic blocks of alpine rocks scattered over the slopes and summits of the Jura Mountains had been moved there by glaciers. The question having attracted the attention of Agassiz, he not only discussed it with Charpentier and Schimper and made successive journeys to the alpine regions in company with them, but he had a hut constructed upon one of the Aar Glaciers, which for a time he made his home, in order to investigate the structure and movements of the ice.

These labours resulted, in 1840, in the publication of his work in two volumes entitled Etudes sur les glaciers ("Study on Glaciers"). In it he discussed the movements of the glaciers, their moraines, their influence in grooving and rounding the rocks over which they travelled, and in producing the striations and roches moutonnees seen in Alpine-style landscapes. He not only accepted Charpentier's and Schimper's idea that some of the alpine glaciers had extended across the wide plains and valleys drained by the Aar and the Rhône, but he went still farther. He concluded that, in the relatively recent past, Switzerland had been another Greenland; that instead of a few glaciers stretching across the areas referred to, one vast sheet of ice, originating in the higher Alps, had extended over the entire valley of northwestern Switzerland until it reached the southern slopes of the Jura, which, though they checked and deflected its further extension, did not prevent the ice from reaching in many places the summit of the range. The publication of this work gave a fresh impetus to the study of glacial phenomena in all parts of the world.

Thus familiarized with the phenomena associated with the movements of recent glaciers, Agassiz was prepared for a discovery which he made in 1840, in conjunction with William Buckland. The two visited the mountains of Scotland together, and found in different locations clear evidence of ancient glacial action. The discovery was announced to the Geological Society of London in successive communications. The mountainous districts of England, Wales, and Ireland were also considered to constitute centres for the dispersion of glacial debris; and Agassiz remarked "that great sheets of ice, resembling those now existing in Greenland, once covered all the countries in which unstratified gravel (boulder drift) is found; that this gravel was in general produced by the trituration of the sheets of ice upon the subjacent surface, etc."

In 1842–1846 he issued his Nomenclator Zoologicus, a classified list, with references, of all names employed in zoology for genera and groups — a work of great labour and research. With the aid of a grant of money from the King of Prussia, Agassiz crossed the Atlantic in the autumn of 1846 with the twin purposes of investigating the natural history and geology of North America and delivering a course of 12 lectures on “The Plan of Creation as shown in the Animal Kingdom,” by invitation from J. A. Lowell, at the Lowell Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. The financial and scientific advantages presented to him in the United States induced him to settle there, where he remained to the end of his life. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1846.

His engagement for the Lowell Institute lectures precipitated the establishment of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University in 1847 with him as its head. Harvard appointed him professor of zoology and geology, and he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology there in 1859 serving as the museum's first director until his death in 1873. During his tenure at Harvard, he was, among many other things, an early student of the effect of the last Ice Age on North America.

He continued his lectures for the Lowell Institute. In succeeding years, he gave series of lectures on “Ichthyology” (1847–48 season), “Comparative Embryology” (1848–49), “Functions of Life in Lower Animals” (1850–51), “Natural History” (1853–54), “Methods of Study in Natural History” (1861–62), “Glaciers and the Ice Period” (1864–65), “Brazil” (1866–67) and “Deep Sea Dredging” (1869–70). In 1850 he married an American college teacher, Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz, who later wrote introductory books about natural history and, after his death, a lengthy biography of her husband.

Agassiz served as a non-resident lecturer at Cornell while also being on faculty at Harvard. In 1852 he accepted a medical professorship of comparative anatomy at Charlestown, Massachusetts, but he resigned in two years. From this time his scientific studies dropped off, but he was a profound influence on the American branches of his two fields, teaching decades worth of future prominent scientists, including Alpheus Hyatt, David Starr Jordan, Joel Asaph Allen, Joseph Le Conte, Ernest Ingersoll, William James, Nathaniel Shaler, Samuel Hubbard Scudder, Alpheus Packard, and his son Alexander Agassiz, among others. He had a profound impact on the paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott. In return his name appears attached to several species, as well as here and there throughout the American landscape, notably Lake Agassiz, the Pleistocene precursor to Lake Winnipeg and the Red River.

During this time he grew in fame even in the public consciousness, becoming one of the best-known scientists in the world. By 1857 he was so well-loved that his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote "The fiftieth birthday of Agassiz" in his honor. His own writing continued with four (of a planned ten) volumes of Natural History of the United States which were published from 1857 to 1862. During this time he also published a catalog of papers in his field, Bibliographia Zoologiae et Geologiae, in four volumes between 1848 and 1854.

Stricken by ill health in the 1860s, he resolved to return to the field for relaxation and to resume his studies of Brazilian fish. In April 1865 he led a party to Brazil. Returning home in August 1866, an account of this expedition, entitled A Journey in Brazil, was published in 1868. In December 1871 he made a second eight month excursion, known as the Hassler expedition under the command of Commander Philip Carrigan Johnson (brother of Eastman Johnson), visiting South America on its southern Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. The ship explored the Magellan Strait, which drew the praise of Charles Darwin.

Elizabeth Aggasiz wrote, at the Strait: '…the Hassler pursued her course, past a seemingly endless panorama of mountains and forests rising into the pale regions of snow and ice, where lay glaciers in which every rift and crevasse, as well as the many cascades flowing down to join the waters beneath, could be counted as she steamed by them.... These were weeks of exquisite delight to Agassiz. The vessel often skirted the shore so closely that its geology could be studied from the deck.'

   

in Wikipédia

Louis Agassiz morreu há 148 anos

   

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (Môtier, 18 de maio de 1807 - Cambridge, 14 de dezembro de 1873) foi um zoólogo e geólogo suíço, notório por sua Expedição Thayer.

Louis Agassiz nasceu em Môtier (Vully), no Cantão de Friburgo, Suíça. O início da sua educação começou em casa, seguido de quatro anos numa escola secundária em Bienne (alemão Biel), completou os seus estudos elementares na academia de Lausanne. Seleccionando a medicina como a sua profissão, estudou nas universidades de Zurique, Heidelberg e Munique. Em seguida aumentou o seu conhecimento nos processos biológicos, especialmente na Botânica. Em 1829, doutorou-se em Erlangen e em 1830 doutorou-se em medicina em Munique.

Mudou-se para Paris e ficou sobre a tutela de Alexander von Humboldt e de Georges Cuvier, que o lançaram nas suas carreiras da Geologia e do Zoologia respectivamente. Até esta altura não prestou nenhuma atenção especial ao estudo da Ictiologia, a qual se transformou na grande ocupação de sua vida, ou pelo menos na área em que actualmente é mais recordado.

in Wikipédia

   

In 1832 he was appointed professor of natural history in the University of Neuchâtel. The fossil fish there soon attracted his attention. The fossil-rich stones furnished by the slates of Glarus and the limestones of Monte Bolca were known at the time, but very little had been accomplished in the way of scientific study of them. Agassiz, as early as 1829, planned the publication of the work which, more than any other, laid the foundation of his worldwide fame. Five volumes of his Recherches sur les poissons fossiles ("Research on Fossil Fish") appeared at intervals from 1833 to 1843. They were magnificently illustrated, chiefly by Joseph Dinkel. In gathering materials for this work Agassiz visited the principal museums in Europe, and meeting Cuvier in Paris, he received much encouragement and assistance from him. They had known him for seven years at the time.

Agassiz found that his palaeontological labours made necessary a new basis of ichthyological classification. The fossils rarely exhibited any traces of the soft tissues of fish. They consisted chiefly of the teeth, scales and fins, even the bones being perfectly preserved in comparatively few instances. He therefore adopted a classification which divided fish into four groups: Ganoids, Placoids, Cycloids and Ctenoids, based on the nature of the scales and other dermal appendages. While Agassiz did much to place the subject on a scientific basis, this classification has been superseded by later work.

As Agassiz's descriptive work proceeded, it became obvious that it would over-tax his resources unless financial assistance could be found. The British Association came to his aid, and the Earl of Ellesmere — then Lord Francis Egerton — gave him yet more efficient help. The 1,290 original drawings made for the work were purchased by the Earl, and presented by him to the Geological Society of London. In 1836 the Wollaston Medal was awarded to Agassiz by the council of that society for his work on fossil ichthyology; and in 1838 he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society. Meanwhile invertebrate animals engaged his attention. In 1837 he issued the "Prodrome" of a monograph on the recent and fossil Echinodermata, the first part of which appeared in 1838; in 1839–40 he published two quarto volumes on the fossil Echinoderms of Switzerland; and in 1840–45 he issued his Etudes critiques sur les mollusques fossiles ("Critical Studies on Fossil Mollusks").

Before his first visit to England in 1834, the labours of Hugh Miller and other geologists brought to light the remarkable fish of the Old Red Sandstone of the northeast of Scotland. The strange forms of the Pterichthys, the Coccosteus and other genera were then made known to geologists for the first time. They were of intense interest to Agassiz, and formed the subject of a special monograph by him published in 1844–45: Monographie des poissons fossiles du Vieux Gres Rouge, ou Systeme Devonien (Old Red Sandstone) des Iles Britanniques et de Russie ("Monograph on Fossil Fish of the Old Red Sandstone, or Devonian System of the British Isles and of Russia"). In the early stages of his career in Neuchatel, Agassiz also made a name for himself as a man who could run a scientific department well. Under his care, the University of Neuchâtel soon became a leading institution for scientific inquiry.

In 1837 Agassiz was the first to scientifically propose that the Earth had been subject to a past ice age. In the same year, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Prior to this proposal, Goethe, de Saussure, Venetz, Jean de Charpentier, Karl Friedrich Schimper and others had made the glaciers of the Alps the subjects of special study, and Goethe, Charpentier as well as Schimper had even arrived at the conclusion that the erratic blocks of alpine rocks scattered over the slopes and summits of the Jura Mountains had been moved there by glaciers. The question having attracted the attention of Agassiz, he not only discussed it with Charpentier and Schimper and made successive journeys to the alpine regions in company with them, but he had a hut constructed upon one of the Aar Glaciers, which for a time he made his home, in order to investigate the structure and movements of the ice.

These labours resulted, in 1840, in the publication of his work in two volumes entitled Etudes sur les glaciers ("Study on Glaciers"). In it he discussed the movements of the glaciers, their moraines, their influence in grooving and rounding the rocks over which they travelled, and in producing the striations and roches moutonnees seen in Alpine-style landscapes. He not only accepted Charpentier's and Schimper's idea that some of the alpine glaciers had extended across the wide plains and valleys drained by the Aar and the Rhône, but he went still farther. He concluded that, in the relatively recent past, Switzerland had been another Greenland; that instead of a few glaciers stretching across the areas referred to, one vast sheet of ice, originating in the higher Alps, had extended over the entire valley of northwestern Switzerland until it reached the southern slopes of the Jura, which, though they checked and deflected its further extension, did not prevent the ice from reaching in many places the summit of the range. The publication of this work gave a fresh impetus to the study of glacial phenomena in all parts of the world.

Thus familiarized with the phenomena associated with the movements of recent glaciers, Agassiz was prepared for a discovery which he made in 1840, in conjunction with William Buckland. The two visited the mountains of Scotland together, and found in different locations clear evidence of ancient glacial action. The discovery was announced to the Geological Society of London in successive communications. The mountainous districts of England, Wales, and Ireland were also considered to constitute centres for the dispersion of glacial debris; and Agassiz remarked "that great sheets of ice, resembling those now existing in Greenland, once covered all the countries in which unstratified gravel (boulder drift) is found; that this gravel was in general produced by the trituration of the sheets of ice upon the subjacent surface, etc."

In 1842–1846 he issued his Nomenclator Zoologicus, a classified list, with references, of all names employed in zoology for genera and groups — a work of great labour and research. With the aid of a grant of money from the King of Prussia, Agassiz crossed the Atlantic in the autumn of 1846 with the twin purposes of investigating the natural history and geology of North America and delivering a course of 12 lectures on “The Plan of Creation as shown in the Animal Kingdom,” by invitation from J. A. Lowell, at the Lowell Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. The financial and scientific advantages presented to him in the United States induced him to settle there, where he remained to the end of his life. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1846.

His engagement for the Lowell Institute lectures precipitated the establishment of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University in 1847 with him as its head. Harvard appointed him professor of zoology and geology, and he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology there in 1859 serving as the museum's first director until his death in 1873. During his tenure at Harvard, he was, among many other things, an early student of the effect of the last Ice Age on North America.

He continued his lectures for the Lowell Institute. In succeeding years, he gave series of lectures on “Ichthyology” (1847–48 season), “Comparative Embryology” (1848–49), “Functions of Life in Lower Animals” (1850–51), “Natural History” (1853–54), “Methods of Study in Natural History” (1861–62), “Glaciers and the Ice Period” (1864–65), “Brazil” (1866–67) and “Deep Sea Dredging” (1869–70). In 1850 he married an American college teacher, Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz, who later wrote introductory books about natural history and, after his death, a lengthy biography of her husband.

Agassiz served as a non-resident lecturer at Cornell while also being on faculty at Harvard. In 1852 he accepted a medical professorship of comparative anatomy at Charlestown, Massachusetts, but he resigned in two years. From this time his scientific studies dropped off, but he was a profound influence on the American branches of his two fields, teaching decades worth of future prominent scientists, including Alpheus Hyatt, David Starr Jordan, Joel Asaph Allen, Joseph Le Conte, Ernest Ingersoll, William James, Nathaniel Shaler, Samuel Hubbard Scudder, Alpheus Packard, and his son Alexander Agassiz, among others. He had a profound impact on the paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott. In return his name appears attached to several species, as well as here and there throughout the American landscape, notably Lake Agassiz, the Pleistocene precursor to Lake Winnipeg and the Red River.

During this time he grew in fame even in the public consciousness, becoming one of the best-known scientists in the world. By 1857 he was so well-loved that his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote "The fiftieth birthday of Agassiz" in his honor. His own writing continued with four (of a planned ten) volumes of Natural History of the United States which were published from 1857 to 1862. During this time he also published a catalog of papers in his field, Bibliographia Zoologiae et Geologiae, in four volumes between 1848 and 1854.

Stricken by ill health in the 1860s, he resolved to return to the field for relaxation and to resume his studies of Brazilian fish. In April 1865 he led a party to Brazil. Returning home in August 1866, an account of this expedition, entitled A Journey in Brazil, was published in 1868. In December 1871 he made a second eight month excursion, known as the Hassler expedition under the command of Commander Philip Carrigan Johnson (brother of Eastman Johnson), visiting South America on its southern Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. The ship explored the Magellan Strait, which drew the praise of Charles Darwin.

Elizabeth Aggasiz wrote, at the Strait: '…the Hassler pursued her course, past a seemingly endless panorama of mountains and forests rising into the pale regions of snow and ice, where lay glaciers in which every rift and crevasse, as well as the many cascades flowing down to join the waters beneath, could be counted as she steamed by them.... These were weeks of exquisite delight to Agassiz. The vessel often skirted the shore so closely that its geology could be studied from the deck.'

   

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Há oito anos o vulcão islandês Eyjafjallajökull paralizou os voos na Europa

O Eyjafjallajökull é um dos glaciares de menores dimensões da Islândia. Situa-se a norte de Skógar e a oeste de um glaciar de maiores dimensões conhecido como Mýrdalsjökull.

A bacia do glaciar cobre um vulcão (1.666 m de altura) cuja actividade eruptiva começou a ser mais frequente a partir da última idade do gelo. A penúltima erupção ocorreu em 1821-23, provocando um jökulhlaup (literalmente, "corrida glaciar") fatal. A cratera do vulcão tem um diâmetro de 3 a 4 km. O glaciar estende-se por cerca de 107 km².

O limite sul da montanha fez, no passado, parte da costa atlântica. Com a regressão marítima, formaram-se penhascos inclinados que originam hoje em dia um conjunto impressionante de quedas de água, sendo a mais conhecida a de Skógafoss. Se houver vento forte, a água das cascatas menores é levada pela montanha acima, pelo ar.

O nome Eyjafjallajökull é uma justaposição dos substantivos islandeses eyja, fjalla e jökull, respectivamente "ilha", "montanha" (ambos no genitivo plural) e "glaciar". O termo pode ser traduzido, literalmente, como "glaciar das montanhas das ilhas" - o Eyjafjallajökull se encontra nas proximidades das ilhas Vestmann.

 

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Mapa mostrando os países em que o tráfego aéreo foi completamente paralisado (vermelho) e parcialmente (laranja); a Islândia aparece a verde

As erupções ocorridas em 2010 no glaciar Eyjafjallajökull (pronúncia: eia-fiatla-iocutl) são uma série de grandes eventos vulcânicos que ocorreram em Eyjafjallajökull, na Islândia. A atividade sísmica, que se iniciou no final de 2009, deu lugar a uma erupção vulcânica que se iniciou a 20 de março de 2010, colocando seu Índice de Explosividade Vulcânica em 1. Uma fase da erupção, a 14 de abril de 2010, causou uma paralisação generalizada do transporte aéreo europeu, afetando milhares de voos e causando uma espécie de efeito dominó em todo o mundo.

Mapa composto da nuvem de cinza vulcânica abrangendo nos dias de 14 a 25 de abril de 2010

  

As cinzas vulcânicas trazidas pelos ventos são um grande perigo para as aeronaves. Por esse motivo, a segunda fase da erupção causou um grande distúrbio no tráfego aéreo europeu e mundial. Enquanto algumas cinzas foram a áreas desabitadas na Islândia, a maioria foi levada por ventos do oeste, indo parar à Europa. Os gases e cinzas reduzem a visibilidade e quando entram nas turbinas podem paralisar os motores do avião. Por esse motivo, seguindo as regras da IFR, Finlândia, Alemanha, Áustria, Bélgica, Dinamarca, Eslováquia, Eslovénia, Estónia, Holanda Hungria, Irlanda, Letónia, Luxemburgo, Polónia, Portugal, Reino Unido, República Checa, Roménia, Suíça e os territórios de Aland e Ilhas Faroé tiveram o tráfego aéreo fechado. A Associação Internacional de Transportes Aéreos (IATA) estima que a indústria aérea mundial perdeu cerca de €148 milhões por dia durante a interrupção.

 

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Há três anos, um vulcão islandês com nome impronunciavel, paralizou os céus europeus

Eyjafjallajökull é um dos glaciares de menores dimensões da Islândia. Situa-se a norte de Skógar e a oeste do glaciar de maiores dimensões conhecido como Mýrdalsjökull.

A bacia do glaciar cobre um vulcão (1666 m de altura) cuja actividade eruptiva começou a ser mais frequente a partir da última idade do gelo. A penúltima erupção ocorreu em 1821-23, provocando um jökulhlaup (literalmente, "corrida glaciar") fatal. A cratera do vulcão tem um diâmetro de 3 a 4 km. O glaciar estende-se por cerca de 107 km².

O limite sul da montanha fez, no passado, parte da costa atlântica. Com a regressão marítima, formaram-se penhascos inclinados que originam hoje em dia um conjunto impressionante de quedas de água, sendo a mais conhecida a de Skógafoss. Se houver vento forte, a água das cascatas menores é levada pela montanha acima, pelo ar.

O nome Eyjafjallajökull é uma justaposição dos substantivos islandeses eyja, fjalla e jökull, respectivamente "ilha", "montanha" (ambos no genitivo plural) e "glaciar". O termo pode ser traduzido, literalmente, como "glaciar das montanhas das ilhas" - o Eyjafjallajökull se encontra nas proximidades das ilhas Vestmann.

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Mapa mostrando os países em que o tráfego aéreo foi completamente paralisado (vermelho) e parcialmente (laranja); a Islândia aparece a verde

As erupções ocorridas em 2010 no glaciar Eyjafjallajökull (pronúncia: eia-fiatla-iocutl) são uma série de grandes eventos vulcânicos que ocorreram em Eyjafjallajökull, na Islândia. A atividade sísmica, que se iniciou no final de 2009, deu lugar a uma erupção vulcânica que se iniciou a 20 de março de 2010, colocando seu Índice de Explosividade Vulcânica em 1. Uma fase da erupção, a 14 de abril de 2010, causou uma paralisação generalizada do transporte aéreo europeu, afetando milhares de voos e causando uma espécie de efeito dominó em todo o mundo.

Mapa composto da nuvem de cinza vulcânica abrangendo nos dias de 14 a 25 de abril de 2010

As cinzas vulcânicas trazidas pelos ventos são um grande perigo para as aeronaves. Por esse motivo, a segunda fase da erupção causou um grande distúrbio no tráfego aéreo europeu e mundial. Enquanto algumas cinzas foram a áreas desabitadas na Islândia, a maioria foi levada por ventos do oeste, indo parar à Europa. Os gases e cinzas reduzem a visibilidade e quando entram nas turbinas podem paralisar os motores do avião. Por esse motivo, seguindo as regras da IFR, Finlândia, Alemanha, Áustria, Bélgica, Dinamarca, Eslováquia, Eslovénia, Estónia, Holanda Hungria, Irlanda, Letónia, Luxemburgo, Polónia, Portugal, Reino Unido, República Checa, Roménia, Suíça e os territórios de Aland e Ilhas Faroé tiveram o tráfego aéreo fechado. A Associação Internacional de Transportes Aéreos (IATA) estima que a indústria aérea mundial perdeu cerca de €148 milhões por dia durante a interrupção.

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Mercalli morreu há 94 anos

(imagem daqui)

Giuseppe Mercalli (Milão, 21 de Maio de 1850 - Nápoles, 19 de Março de 1914) foi um sacerdote, vulcanólogo e sismólogo italiano.

Foi professor de mineralogia na Universidade de Catânia e de vulcanologia na Universidade de Nápoles. Em 1911 sucedeu a Raffaele Vittorio Matteucci no cargo de director do Observatório do Vesúvio. Os seus estudos na área da sismologia e da vulcanologia granjearam-lhe reputação internacional. Notabilizou-se pelo desenvolvimento da Escala de Mercalli para avaliação da intensidade dos sismos, uma das escalas sísmicas com maior aceitação durante quase todo o século XX, e pela publicação de um sistema de classificação das erupções vulcânicas.

Nascido em Milão no seio de uma família de meios modestos, Giuseppe Mercalli ingressou no Seminário de Milão imediatamente após os estudos elementares e ali fez os seus estudos secundários e preparatórios. Foi ordenado, em 1871, sacerdote católico.

Entre 1871 e 1874 foi aluno da Escola Normal anexa ao Instituto Técnico Superior de Milão, frequentando o curso destinado à formação de professores de Ciências Naturais. Nesse curso estudou geologia com Antonio Stoppani, obtendo a laurea em Ciências Naturais no ano de 1874. Pouco depois foi nomeado professor de Ciências Naturais no Seminário de Monza e no Liceo católico de Domodossola, mas em 1888 foi obrigado a abandonar o ensino em estabelecimentos católicos depois de ter apoiado a construção de um monumento nacional em homenagem ao sacerdote e filósofo Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, o que fez dele suspeito de aderente ao ideário do liberalismo. Dedicou-se ao estudos geológicos, iniciando-se com o estudo dos glaciares alpinos da Lombardia, publicando várias notícias sobre as suas características e os depósitos associados.

Depois de ter feitos exames pedagógicos em Monza, obtendo habilitação para o ensino liceal, foi nomeado em concurso feito pelo governo italiano para um lugar em Reggio di Calabria como professor liceal. Primeiro no concurso, a escolha de Reggio di Calabria deveu-se ao desejo de Mercalli de estar presente na região da Calábria, ao tempo atingida por uma crise sísmica e onde se esperava um terramoto. Manteve activa investigação no campo da geologia, dedicando-se progressivamente à sismologia e à vulcanologia.

Concorreu a professor de mineralogia e geologia da Universidade de Catânia, mas ficou em terceiro lugar, concorrendo então para um lugar de professor liceal em Nápoles, o que conseguiu em 1892. No período de 1892 a 1911 foi professor no Reggio Liceo Vittorio Emanuele de Nápoles, onde contou entre os seus alunos Giuseppe Moscati. Entre os colegas e colaboradores estava Achille Ratti, que posteriormente seria o papa Pio XI, que fora seu aluno no Seminário de Milão e com quem manteve uma sólida amizade. A partir do ano seguinte (1893) passou a acumular com aulas de vulcanologia na Universidade de Nápoles.

Em 1911 foi escolhido para o lugar de director do Observatório Vesuviano, cargo em que sucedeu a Raffaele Vittorio Matteucci e que manteve até falecer. Passa então a dedicar-se em exclusivo ao estudo da vulcanologia e projecta uma reforma do Observatório, com base num programa de investigação que previa o estudo do vulcão e das suas erupções, o registo da actividade sísmica e pré-sísmica (percursores), para além das observações e das análise dos resultados do trabalho de campo que deveria ser feito no vulcão e suas proximidades.

Giuseppe Mercalli notabilizou-se pelo desenvolvimento, em 1902 da escala de Mercalli, uma escala destinada à avaliação da intensidade sísmica, que com algumas modificações ainda se mantém em uso, mais de um século após a sua publicação. Aquela escala, apesar de não medir a magnitude dos sismos, mas apenas os seus efeitos sobre as pessoas e os edifícios, sendo por isso pouco adequado para uso em áreas pouco povoadas. A escala mostrou-se ideal para comparar os danos produzidos pelos terramotos e para fins de engenharia sísmica e de protecção civil.

Mercalli faleceu em 1914, vítima de um incêndio que deflagrou na sua casa na Via Sapienza (Nápoles), alegadamente por ter entornado uma lâmpada de parafina que utilizava para trabalhar durante a noite. Pensa-se que teria estado a trabalhar durante a noite, algo que fazia rotineiramente, contando-se que uma vez foi encontrado a trabalhar às 11 horas da manhã e sendo informada da hora terá exclamado: Seguramente que ainda não é dia!. O seu cadáver foi encontrado carbonizado, próximo da sua cama, agarrando um cobertor que utilizara para tentar apagar o fogo. Apesar disso parecer indicar um acidente, as autoridades policiais informaram, alguns dias mais tarde, que Mercalli fora provavelmente assassinado por estrangulamento e o seu cadáver regado com petróleo e queimado para esconder o crime. Teria desaparecido da casa uma importante quantia em dinheiro.

Giuseppe Mercalli observou a erupção vulcânica das ilhas Eólias (ou Líparas), dos vulcões Stromboli e Vulcano, publicando descrições que continuam a ser importante material de estudo para os vulcanólogos. Para além da investigação no campo de vulcanologia, também estudou os glaciares da Lombardia.

Foi autor de mais de uma centena de publicações científicas (pelo menos 115), com destaque para a obra I vulcani attivi della Terra (Os vulcões activos da Terra), publicada em 1889, considerada um clássico da vulcanologia que se mantém actual. Em 1903 publicou uma escala destinada à categorização das erupções vulcânicas. Realizou a primeira carta sísmica do território italiano. Estudou o comportamento dos animais antes e durante os sismos, detectando reacções de nervosismo e de tremor que apelidou de síndrome cinestéstica inexplicável, depois conhecido como Síndrome de Mercalli. Também publicou informação pioneira sobre os bradissismos.

Foi membro de importantes sociedades científicas e foi cavaleiro da Ordine della Corona d'Italia por mérito científico. No Cemitério Monumental de Milão, onde está sepultado, foi-lhe erigido um busto em bronze da autoria de Michele Vedani. Em Nápoles existe em sua homenagem o Liceo Scientifico Statale "Giuseppe Mercalli".

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